How to Cut Vinyl Tiles

Vinyl tile provides attractive and inexpensive floor covering, and the first step of laying vinyl tile is cutting it. Cut your tiles easily and accurately with tips from a professional contractor in this free video on cutting vinyl tiles.

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Video Transcript

Hi, my name is Chris Wade, and I'm a contractor from the city of Los Angeles and today we're going to show you how to cut vinyl tiles. Here we have our vinyl tile and basically vinyl tile is an inexpensive way to do a floor. There's really not much prep. It's just basically a wood floor, wood plywood and glue which you just spread around but right now I'm just going to show you how to cut this thing. Most of the time, you're going to lay these, you're going to start in the center of a room and you're going to work your way to your borders and that's where your borders are going to be cut and so once you get to that point you're going to measure out whatever it is. We're just going to do a 5 inch cut, make your marks, make your straight line. Go ahead and make your line and you're going to take your utility knife with a nice sharp blade. Unless you've got a really good freehand it's best to just hold your ruler or whatever straight edge you're using on the material as a guide but go ahead and mark it anyway and basically you're just going to cut it once or twice, score it and then just pick your piece up and just that's it. Now, we're going to take a piece as if you had to cut around a border where it requires like a notch cut. Here we're going to do, we'll just do a simple five inch notch cut so you'd measure down five inches and you'd measure five inches across here, make your mark. Definitely use a pencil because if you go over, it, you know, it just wipes right off. Just make your cuts. Now on this one, it's easier not to use the straight edge because you can't just score it and break it because we're doing two separate cuts. So you're going to have to take a really good sharp knife blade and it's best to start in the middle and work your way down that way if you get a little wobbly down at the end, you don't go beyond your cut which is going to be your finished product. So, you're just going to make a score mark, lightly make a score mark which gives you your line to really press in and then you can do it once, twice, maybe three times if you need to. Again start from the middle and back this way so you don't mess up your finished material and if you're watching this and you've been in the Boy Scouts, I know this violates the knife rule. You're supposed to cut away from yourself but in this particular situation, you'll be just fine. And there you go. And that's how you would cut your vinyl tile. A straight cut, use a straight edge, notch cuts, make your line, cut from the center towards the edge and that will get you going. And that's how you do it.